Clinton – Not Obama – Told Canada They’re Not Serious About NAFTA

by Paul Hogarth, 2008-03-07

(Editors Note: NPR today became the first traditional media outlet to confirm what we and other sources reported on March 5: Barack Obama won more delegates in Texas than Hillary Clinton, winning the caucuses by 56-44%)

Barack Obama lost Ohio on March 4th by a wider-than-expected margin of ten points. Without a doubt, NAFTA-Gate – where an Obama aide supposedly told Canadian diplomats not to take his rhetoric on the trade agreement seriously – hurt him badly in this heavily working-class state. Now the Canadian government fully admits that they misconstrued what the aide said – and according to the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, it was actually Hillary Clinton’s campaign who advised them to take their candidate’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric “with a grain of salt.” But somehow, the media screwed up and reported it as Obama. With the Pennsylvania primary on April 22nd, will the truth get out in time about this scuffle – or will NAFTA-Gate keep hurting Obama’s chances with working-class voters?

The Ohio primary may be over, but NAFTA-Gate and its repercussions are still being felt up in Canada. Officials worry that their future diplomatic relations with the United States have been placed in jeopardy, and yesterday members of Parliament did not mince words to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The Harper Administration vowed to run a full investigation, while admitting that the leaks were “blatantly unfair” to Obama and possibly illegal.

Here’s how the mess started. On February 26th, Harper’s chief of staff Ian Brodie met with Canadian reporters to talk about the budget. At one point, the discussion moved to what American presidential candidates were saying about NAFTA – both Clinton and Obama have publicly talked about re-negotiating the trade agreement – and Brodie told them not to take it seriously. The Clinton camp had contacted them, he explained, and assured them that it was all political posturing.

But when the story was broadcast on CTV (Canada's major TV network), Washington Bureau Chief Tom Clark reported it was the Obama – not Clinton – camp who advised them not to worry about NAFTA. Nobody knows how that mix-up happened, and CTV News President refused to comment when confronted this week by one of Canada’s major newspapers.

Then, right before the Ohio primary on March 4th, someone in the Canadian government leaked a memo about a meeting that the Canadian consul in Chicago had with Professor Austan Goolsbee – an economic adviser to Obama. According to the memo, Goolsbee assured them that his candidate’s rhetoric against NAFTA was just “political positioning” and would not actually result in an Obama Administration pulling out of the agreement.

Over the next few days, Hillary Clinton and John McCain gleefully took as much mileage out of that memo as they could. Clinton used it to reinforce her attacks on Obama that he was “all words and no action,” and that he was engendering “false hopes” on the voters.

Now it turns out the memo in question was wrong – with even the Canadian government admitting that they misconstrued some of Goolsbee’s statements. And there’s a huge scuffle in Canada about how the confidential memo was even leaked in the first place – with the Prime Minister’s foes demanding resignations.

Goolsbee did meet with the Canadian consul in Chicago, but it was at the urging of Canadian diplomats (not vice versa, as the original story was reported). Goolsbee did admit in the meeting that there was strong protectionist sentiment among voters, but what he actually said was no different from what Obama had said publicly on the campaign trail – he wants NAFTA amended to include tough labor and environmental protections.

But by then, it was too late. The NAFTA memo – despite being inaccurate – had already salvaged Clinton’s campaign in Ohio, right after her working-class coalition had crumbled in Wisconsin. Clinton’s attacks on Obama had scared enough voters to fall back into her fold, allowing her to continue the campaign over the next several months.

While the memo has been debunked and the Obama camp vindicated, problems persist on whether the Clinton campaign did precisely what they had accused Obama of doing. Clinton denied that her campaign assured the Canadians about NAFTA – but unlike the Obama memo, the Canadian government has yet to confirm or deny the allegation.

As Randy Shaw reported last week, Clinton has re-invented her past on NAFTA in order to escape political accountability for her husband’s Administration. But she has not hesitated to attack Obama for allegedly supporting such unfair trade agreements if it will get her political mileage.

For years, the Clintons have gotten away with betraying progressive constituencies – and for years, nobody ever called them on it. From NAFTA to the Defense of Marriage Act to Welfare Repeal, it is apparent that Democrats simply cannot trust them to stand tall for progressive values. Ironically, however, NAFTA ended up helping Hillary in Ohio – because the voters believed that Obama had betrayed them with false promises.

Could this issue come back to bite Clinton in Pennsylvania – if the revised story reaches that state’s working-class voters and they realize that she’s a liar and a hypocrite? Don’t count on the American press to make it a big story. After all, they’re still too busy wrongly depicting Tuesday’s results as a huge win for Clinton.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In his spare time and outside of regular work hours, Paul Hogarth volunteered on Obama’s field operation in San Francisco.